Right Thinking from the Left Coast

Tag: Bill Clinton

Look, I’ve said this before. I don’t like political dynasties. We’ve seen enough of them. So no more Bushes. No more Daleys. No more Cuomos. No more Rockefellers. Certainly no more God-damned Kennedys.

And no … no more Clintons. I don’t think Chelsea even wants to be in politics. This is just some weird fetish that’s developed on the Left.

Bill Clinton was a decent President. Since then, the Clintons have brought nothing but ruin and strife to the party. Stop treating them like they’re a royal family or something.

Bill Clinton netted $1.6 million last year from a pair of for-profit education companies that caused controversy for the future president during Hillary Clinton’s time as secretary of state.

Laureate Education paid Bill Clinton nearly $1.1 million in 2015, according to tax returns released by his wife’s campaign Friday. GEMS Education, a Dubai-based firm, paid him more than $560,000.

Both companies are major donors to the Clinton Foundation.

Bill Clinton’s lucrative consulting contracts with the corporations have raised questions about how closely his personal fortune is linked to his philanthropic activities.

Not only are both companies donors to the Clinton Foundation, the CEO heads a company that got millions in State Department grants. Over the years, Bill was paid over $15 million to be the honorary chancellor of Laureate.

The moniker “for-profit” colleges is a bit misleading. The problem with “for-profit” colleges is not the profit. All colleges and universities are multi-million or multi-billion dollar operations that pay six figure salaries to their administrators. The President of “non-profit” Harvard, for example, pulled in a cool $900,000 last year. No, the problem is that some of these colleges bring in working and middle-class students, get them to take out massive amounts of federally-backed student loan debt and then give them a poor education. In their way, they are far worse and more insidious than Trump University. John Oliver talks about it here.

In fairness, none of the college singled out by Oliver are part of Laureate. But four of their six US campuses are being monitored by the Department of Education and one of their Chilean campus lost accreditation. Walden University is being sued by a group of people hoping to eventually make a class action. You can read more about the Laureate Scandal here

Don’t let Trump’s awfulness let us forget that the Clintons are pretty awful too. Even if we assume that everything Laureate is doing is peachy, this would still be a scandal for any Republican.

Sit yourself down. You will be shocked to hear this. It turns out that the Clintons were not completely 100% honest about her e-mail server:

The State Department’s inspector general has sharply criticized Hillary Clinton’s exclusive use of a private email server while she was secretary of state, saying she had not sought permission to use it and would not have received it if she had.

In a report delivered to members of Congress on Wednesday, the inspector general said that Mrs. Clinton “had an obligation to discuss using her personal email account to conduct official business” with officials responsible for handling records and security but that inspectors “found no evidence” that she had requested or received approval from anyone at the department to conduct her state business on a personal email.

The report also said that department officials “did not — and would not — approve her exclusive reliance on a personal email account to conduct Department business.”

It also added new detail about Mrs. Clinton’s motivation for using the private server, which she has said was set up for convenience. In November 2010, her deputy chief of staff for operations prodded her about “putting you on state email or releasing your email address to the department so you are not going to spam.” Mrs. Clinton, however, replied that she would consider a separate address or device “but I don’t want any risk of the personal being accessible.”

The report contradicts Clinton on several critics points. It puts the lie to her statement that their e-mail preservation methods had approval. It puts the lie to her statement that other Secretaries had done this (none had their own servers). And it shows that she used a private e-mail server mainly to shield her privacy, not for convenience.

None of these means she will be indicted. It’s not clear if she broke classification rules by accident or on purpose, which makes a difference in whether she’s charged or not (Petraeus, to cite one example, deliberately exposed information he knew was classified). The FBI should conclude their investigation before the election. But indictment or no, that shows once again a fundamental aspect of the Clintons: the lie, frequently, fluently and flagrantly. They lie when they don’t need to. They lie when they need to. They will lie whenever they think they can get away with it. Because they usually can.

It also shows something else: left wingers will defend the Clintons no matter what they do or who they screw over or whether that screwing was consensual. Over the last few days, Trump has been dragging out a lot of old Clinton scandals, some real (Whitewater, Juanita Broaddrick), some phony (Vince Foster). The response of the Clinton defenders, however, never changes: Whitewater was a fake scandal (that, uh, resulted in 40 felony convictions); the Travel Office Controversy was phony (because apparently it’s OK to wreck someone’s life with false embezzlement charges); the Lewinsky scandal was about a blow job (not obstructing justice or committing perjury to avoid embarrassment).

This is why I’ve dreaded this election for the last four years. Whether Clinton wins or loses, we’re going to be rehashing the battles of the 90’s. This is what the Clintons do. This is who they are. This is what 2016 has brought us to.

Update: Reading more on this, it looks worse for Clinton than I thought. The violations appear to be quite deliberate and knowing. As Charles Cooke put it, Clinton wanted to avoid FOIA and thought the rules did not apply to her.

As this goes on, we are rapidly progressing through the known stages of a Clinton scandal, which I will illustrate from the Lewinsky scandal:

Stage 1: Denial. “I never had sex with that woman!”

Stage 2: Misdirection. “This is about Republicans being angry they lost an election! Newt Gingrich cheated on his wife!”

Stage 3: Quibbling. “It depends on what the definition of ‘is’ is”.

Stage 4: Brazenness. “OK, but the economy is doing great! Who cares about a blow job!”

Stage 5: Dismissal. “Why are we still talking about this? It happened so long ago.”

State’s report basically destroys Stage 3. So now we’re transitioning to Stage 4: “But … Trump!” I expect by July, Democrats will be saying that since this happened four years ago, what possible difference could it make?

This piece of crap has been spreading through my Facebook and Twitter feeds like a particularly aggressive form of gonorrhea.

There’s a lot wrong here. First of all, Clinton raised taxes on everyone, not just the rich. Second, the Clinton economy was a product of Republican budget control, NAFTA (passed with Republican help) and the .com boom (enabled by lots of deregulation). Third, Bush cut taxes for everyone. But a spendthrift administration, a real estate bubble and horrible monetary policy from the Fed wrecked the economy anyway. Sorry, liberals, it’s just not that simple.

But, hey. Two can play this mindless meme game. Here’s mine. And it has the advantage of being a little more grounded in reality (click to embiggen).

“You recently came out to say that all rape victims should be believed? But would you say that about Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey, and Paula Jones? Should we believe them as well?” the audience member asked.

“Well, I would say that everybody should be believed at first until they are disbelieved based on evidence,” Clinton said, drawing applause.

Click over for the clip and Clinton’s frozen smile. I have to think she was prepared for this question. It’s tough but I think it’s very fair. If Clinton is jumping on the “guilty until proven innocent” bandwagon, that standard would have her husband out of office on a rail.

In about a week, a book called Clinton Cash is going to drop on bookstores. Already a top-seller, it details a lot of the corruption we’ve been hearing about. Glenn Reynolds:

It was a bad week for Hillary Clinton. So bad, in fact, that The Washington Post declared she had “the worst week in Washington.” From The New York Times, there were reports of shady uranium deals with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Kazakhstan. From The Post, it was reporting on how the Clintons’ foundation seems more like a personal piggy bank. And from Politico, it was a report that “Clinton struggles to contain media barrage on foreign cash.” (If you haven’t kept up, here’s a bullet-point summary of the key bits). And the book that led to all these stories isn’t even out yet.

The responses from Clintonworld have been unconvincing — my favorite was when their supporters denied that a meeting between Bill Clinton and shadowy Kazakh nuclear officials had taken place, only to have a The Times reporter produce photo evidence. But, hey, the Clintons have survived even more concrete evidence of scandal — remember Monica Lewinsky’s semen-stained dress? — so why should this time be any different?

Well, one big difference is that three major news organizations — The Times, The Post and Fox News — are all working on the story. If it were just Fox, the Clintons might be able to spin it as a product of, in Hillary’s famous phrase, the “vast right-wing conspiracy.” But that’s unlikely to fly this time. Even the liberal group Common Cause has called for an audit of the Clinton Foundation’s finances.

Even so, don’t count the Clintons out yet. Even if these scandals ultimately kill Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential candidacy, she’ll be inclined to keep it staggering along as long as possible. So long as it looks as if she might be president, the money will keep coming in, and many people will be afraid to challenge her. As soon as her candidacy falls off the table, so will the money, and the influence.

Reynolds goes through the winners and losers from Clinton’s “bad week”, but I would agree with Nick Gillespie that the real losers are the American people who have yet another reason to doubt their government.

I have obviously not read Schweizer’s book but we don’t need it to know that the Clintons have been wallowing in largesse for years. The Foundation is frantically refiling its taxes and admitting that most of its money gets spent … on itself:

According to the Post, it took in more than $140 million in grants and pledges in 2013 but spent just $9 million on direct aid.

Much of the Foundation’s money goes to travel ($8.5 million in 2013); conferences, conventions and meetings ($9.2 million); and payroll and employee benefits ($30 million). Ten executives received salaries of more than $100,000 in 2013. Eric Braverman, a friend of Chelsea Clinton, was paid nearly $275,000 in salary, benefits, and a housing allowance for just five months’ work as CEO that year.

Bill Allison is a senior fellow at the Sunlight Foundation, a government watchdog group once run by prominent leftist Zephyr Teachout. In Allison’s view, “it seems like the Clinton Foundation operates as a slush fund for the Clintons.”

It’s important to note that the Clinton Foundation’s status as a problematic charity is distinct from the “Clinton cash” issue that Peter Schweizer and others have highlighted. “Clinton cash” focuses on the fundraising methods used by the Clintons. Specifically, there are substantial allegations that they raise money in part because nations and wealthy individuals hope to influence U.S. policy through their donations, and very possibly have succeeded in doing so.

The problem flagged by Charity Navigator and other watchdogs focuses on what the Clinton Foundation does with the money it raises (whether ethically or not). The Foundation’s profligacy and failure to spend a significant percentage of its funds on its alleged mission would be of concern even if there were no ethical problems associated with the Clintons’ fundraising.

I have a sinking feeling that none of this is going to matter in the end. As I said in a previous post, we’ve known who the Clinton are for over two decades and people still love them. But it’s going to be fun watching the cockroaches scatter as the sunlight is finally turned on the Clintons. And how knows? Maybe the Democrats will wake up and realize they’re about to nominate a corrupt surveillance-state supporter, drug warrior and Wall Street darling.

And if that happens … oh my goodness will this election suddenly become unpredictable and fun.

Peter Suderman makes an excellent point about the Obama Administration’s mantra that “we just want to return to the Clinton-era tax rates; things were pretty good back then!”

Most of us can agree that the Clinton years, which saw growing median incomes as well as tiny deficits and steady economic growth, were economic good times, and we’d all like to see that sort of economic performance repeated. If that’s the case, then why should we limit ourselves to just replicating one tiny fragment of Clinton-era governance—higher tax rates on a fairly small number of earners? Why not replicate other aspects of Clinton’s policy mix as well?

Probably because that would entail mentioning something that Obama’s frequent invocations of the Clinton years always ignore: that Clinton’s spending levels were far, far lower than they have been for the last four years—or than President Obama has called for them to be in the years to come.

…

Government spending as a percentage of the economy fell during the Clinton presidency, starting at 21.4 percent and finishing up at about 18.2 percent of GDP in both 2000 and 2001. In 1993, Clinton’s first budget spent $1.4 trillion. The last budget he helped create spent $1.8 trillion. So far, President Obama has spent about $3.5 trillion every year, averaging more than 24 percent of GDP.

I think it’s important to note what Bill Clinton and the Republicans did not do in the 90’s to balance the budget. They did not slash spending left, right and center. They did not gut critical programs. In fact, spending grew in nominal terms. They also did not set vague goals and promise spending cuts in future years in exchange for tax cuts and stimulus spending today.

What they did was exercise restraint. What they did was keep government programs in check and in budget. Even Bill Clinton’s 1993 stimulus bill went down in flames thanks to Republican filibustering (the economy somehow recovered anyway). They did cut some spending significantly — welfare and military spending most notably. But, for the most part, they succeeded by simply not making things worse and letting the economy take care of the rest.

As several Reasonoids have pointed out, this kind of restraint could get our budget balanced within a decade, even without tax increases. Had that kind of restraint been exercised in the last decade, our budget would be hundreds of billions less than it is now. As it is in most of life, 90% of success is simply not fucking up.

That having been said, I think we face a very different challenge right now. The principle budget danger is not discretionary spending but entitlements. Every day we put off the reckoning makes it more difficult, with the ranks of the retired swelling with more and more Boomers. That requires statutory changes to the law and, thankfully, the Republicans appear to be holding out for that. Getting our entitlements under control would do more to get the budget under control than all the discretionary cuts and tax hikes in the world.

Clinton also inherited a much better situation. The economy was rebounding, the Cold War was over and Reagan-Bush I had a far better spending legacy than Bush II-Obama do. Like it or not, some spending is going to have be deep-sixed, preferably starting with corporate welfare. And I’m afraid that Stimulus V: The Search for More Weather-Stripping, is simply not on.

The general point stands: if Obama wants Clinton-era taxes, he needs to start showing Clinton-era spending restraint.

I don’t like Speaker Boehner or trust him. Which just means I have a lot in common with your average conservative Republican congressman (that and skinny-dipping). It bothers me that this is effectively the most powerful Republican in the federal government. He’s going to compromise our best strengths away and we’re going to get screwed. But I really have no idea what else the GOP in the House should do.

We’re talking about Obama’s legacy here. A working and lasting deal on the debt and taxes would be the starting point for anything good or bad that happens after it. Obama missed this chance last time through incompetence and opportunism. He insisted on holding off on any long-term solution until after re-election and allowed the uncertainty of the fiscal cliff and Taxmageddon (as well as Obamacare, now not going away) to drag down the economy for another year and a half.

This is why his first term must be considered to be a failure. Obama roughly held unemployment in place–unless you want to get into the more complex argument about labor force participation–and that was the issue foremost on voter’s minds. But Bill Clinton promised that nobody could have fixed the economy in four years and he wouldn’t lie to us, right? So Obama gets his re-election and another shot at a grand bargain on the debt ceiling and taxes.

Frankly, I’d be more impressed if the federal government woud just pass a real budget in compliance with the law, but they are so fucked that this isn’t even on the table right now. Whatever Big Fuckin’ Deal these damn fools come up with, it’s going to equally celebrated and meaningless. They’re not doing what needs to happen, they’re postponing it. They’re not really doing what they’re supposed to, but making it look like they are. It’s theatre, but we had best know what the audience is expecting to see on stage: The Rich as the antagonist, who must lose at third act.

The GOP is going to lose plainly on taxes. Incomes on those who make over $250,000 need to go up because we can’t keep defending these people for no clear reason. Yeah, yeah, raising taxes now would throw us back into recession or worsen the one we’re already in, depending on your outlook. The proposed tax increases won’t close the deficit either, I know. But Obama must have that to show off. It’s inescapable. Don’t get me wrong, if we HAD to give Obama a trophy, I’d tell him to take Boehner’s testicles; but he doesn’t want them. He wants to confiscate more wealth from the wealthy.

I say that the taxes on top earners have to go up because the American people don’t know dick about economics. Let’s face it. If they did, they would have shown a lot more curiosity about the lack of a federal budget for nearly four years now and possibly asked some questions about why the recovery was oh so weak. Oh, yeah: They probably wouldn’t have re-elected Obama either.

My prediction is that the Democrats will get the tax increase on “the rich” while barely giving anything in return. Don’t get mad about this though. It’s a loser and the GOP will be better off with it resolved. It will suck all the wind out of the “party of the rich” arguments if any other part of the deal falls through.

The GOP has the big gun in this argument. They can always let all of the Bush tax cuts expire. The demented extremist side of me who would like to collectively kick the electorate in the junk for last Tuesday LOVES the thought of doing this just for spite. Shitty thing is that this would hurt my household too. I’m a working schlub, married to a teacher, and we have two kids. We are that middle class that everyone purports to care about so much and really doesn’t. Hence, we hate everyone else.

Obama most assuredly does not want to be blamed for raising taxes on the middle class (except for Obamacare, because “kids with cancer” or something). If the Democrats don’t agree to some spending cuts beyond reducing the military to menacing our enemies with rubberband-fired paper clips, then the GOP must announce that no agreement that realistically reduces the deficit could be reached and they have no choice but to allow the tax cuts to sunset.

The Democrats do not want this and will work hard to prevent it. The problem is that even though we have the advantage in the form of the great tax increase gambit, we have the biggest disadvantage on the game board: Boehner himself. This isn’t about him, it’s about Obama. Both of them want to secure their own legacies and I think Boehner is the less committed of the two. Worse, he still thinks that something can be worked out man-to-man with this president. His greatest weapon is that which Obama most fears: tax increases on everybody. Not beating Obama at golf.

If Boehner does not use the big gun, then he establishes Obama as a good-enough president for resolving the debt stalemate, passes an idiotic compromise that accomplishes nothing for the good of his country, and proves once again how ultimately meaningless it is to give the GOP control of any part of the federal government.

I’m more interested in what happens after Inauguration Day than what happens on Election Day. As much as I want Obama out of office, I wonder how much it would really matter if he loses. My own sense is that his election is all about who is going to be holding the bag of shit when it finally breaks.

As I’ve said in another thread, I think Romney is going to win on Tuesday (assuming that the ballots are all counted and there aren’t any court challenges to deal with). I like Romney and even favored him in 2008. Not that I had any special love for anti-gun, big capitalist, Mormon governors from liberal states. I simply thought he was the best qualified because of his executive experience. His positions are a bit (to put it mildly) flexible and I can easily see him being a Bush-style disappointment on the domestic policy front. But I’m not here to give reasons to vote for or against him. Hal has done an utterly thorough job of it already. Obama could win too, sure. Sometimes my foresight is blinded when I confuse what is happening with what I hope will happen. It’s why I try to stay emotionally unattached. Maybe enough people believed Bill Clinton when he said at the DNC that nobody could have reversed the damage in four years and Obama will pull it together if we just give him another term.

One of these two assholes is going to win, that’s all we know. If Romney wins, he comes into office with a Democratic Senate Majority (or Minority, not sure what to expect here) Leader who has already vowed not to work with him. He will also have a hostile press that will suddenly start noticing again how jacked up our economy and foreign policy are. The potential for a quagmire is limitless. What can he do?

Obama will suffer with an uncooperative House and maybe a Senate. Reid has been, at best, unhelpful to Obama so I have to wonder how much good it would do for Democrats to hold the Senate with an Obama win. Worse, if he wins, it will because of the angry, fearmongering campaign he ran. The divisiveness is not going to fade away just because he squeaks by in a narrow win. Bush made this mistake in 2004 and paid for it dearly the minute he tried to accomplish anything. He was right that something needed to be done, but the other side found that it was better and safer to reject compromise. They turned out to be right–for their own political gain.

Traditionally, presidents in their second terms face scandals and don’t seem to accomplish much. Reagan had Iran/Contra, Clinton had his privates made public, and Bush was simply ground down by Iraq and Katrina. Obama already has Benghazi percolating, even though most of the news media is helpfully keeping the story quiet and not asking a lot of pesky questions until the election is safely over. Obama will do what what he has been doing for the past two years: throwing up executive orders with zero permanence beyond 2016. I suspect that if he wins, he’ll leave a hollow legacy and ultimately destroy the Democratic brand for at least 12 years (to the extent he hasn’t already; we’ll know soon enough).

That’s not a reason to want him to win, but it just highlights the impossibility for either one to accomplish anything with his bag of shit. That bag contains the long-awaited double-dip recession, more credit downgrades, the possibility of inflation, rising threats overseas, and on and on and on. Gridlock is great when we want to avoid the kind of populist overspending that drives us further into debt, but when the government is so dysfunctional that it refuses to pass a budget for four years even as credit agencies continue to warn it about its recklessness, we should worry.

The questions I have are:

1. Are Americans just too divided and partisan to work with those on the other side of the aisle to solve major policy problems? If so, we are well and truly fucked.

2. What sacrifices does each side need to make to effect a Great Compromise to seriously address the economic and debt crisis? I say that the GOP needs to allow some of the Bush tax cuts to expire since they’re clearly not having any stimulative effect at this point while the Democrats need to give up some of their sacred cows.

3. What the hell is it going to take to get away from this 47% vs 47% nonsense where both parties favor their base and win elections by lying to independents? Are we really that divided or is there common ground somewhere?

Recently, Matthew Dowd wrote a fantastic article about the need for a “peace accord” after the election between divided Americans and I like his thinking. We are way too obsessed with seeing points scored against the other side while ignoring the fact that nobody is driving the bus. This isn’t going to change just because Romney or Obama wins and will only get worse if the outcome is seen as questionable. Somebody needs to win BIG and it just isn’t in the cards.

But how do we do this peace accord thing? Are there any people in government/media/anywhere who have the credibility and know-how to even negotiate this? We can’t seem to quit looking past getting our team into office to realize that the people we elect aren’t governing.

I’ll do my part and turn out to vote, but I’m keeping my expectations safely low until I see evidence that the electorate even wants leadership. Right now, I’m not seeing it and that’s why we’re going to be stuck with nothing but the fool who wins.

Rahm Emanuel was right about not letting crises “go to waste” and it’s obvious that nothing is going to happen until disaster is staring us in the face. In the end, I guess I’m only voting for Romney because I’m less afraid of what he’ll do with it. Anyway, sorry to fill your weekend with darkness!

Yup, you heard that right. In fact, it is even more damning because, well read for yourself:

In his weekend radio address, President Obama decried that “over the past three decades, the middle class has lost ground while the wealthiest few have become even wealthier.” Although he was trying to leverage the Occupy Wall Street movement, the income gap has been a longstanding concern of his.

During the 2008 campaign, Obama said, “The project of the next president is figuring out how do you create bottom-up economic growth, as opposed to the trickle-down economic growth that George Bush has been so enamored with.”

But it turns out that the rich actually got poorer under President Bush, and the income gap has been climbing under Obama. What’s more, the biggest increase in income inequality over the past three decades took place when Democrat Bill Clinton was in the White House.

Frankly, when you understand what the leftist politicians definition of “social justice” really translates into – they pick who wins and who loses – it comes as no surprise that their friends & donors, the ones pushing whatever idiotic things the left tells us are the must have of the future, end up getting enormous amount of wealth transferred from the US tax payers to them.

Solyndra was just an obvious example of what the left’s “social justice” politics does: it throws other people’s money at bad things, enriching those that cozy up to the leftists. There is a reason that companies like GE and money bundlers like that Kaiser fella behind Solyndra love leftist big government types.

The wealthiest 5% of U.S. households saw incomes fall 7% after inflation in Bush’s eight years in office, according to an IBD analysis of Census Bureau data. A widely used household income inequality measure, the Gini index, was essentially flat over that span. Another inequality gauge, the Theil index, showed a decline.

In contrast, the Gini index rose — slightly — in Obama’s first two years. Another Census measure of inequality shows it’s climbed 5.7% since he took office.

Meanwhile, during Clinton’s eight years, the wealthiest 5% of American households saw their incomes jump 45% vs. 26% under Reagan. The Gini index shot up 6.7% under Clinton, more than any other president since 1980.

Want to know what else has grown disproportionally during the Obama years? The misery index. The dollar is worth shit, US debt is up $5 trillion in a short 3 years, people sucking at the government’s teat are at a record high, and those looking for something paid by other people now don’t even feel shame when they demand more and are called on it. But the LSM isn’t going to report that. Not when the guy in the WH has a (D) next to his name, and certainly not when they rigged the candidate coverage during that election to get him there.

To the extent that income inequality is a problem, it’s not clear what can be done to resolve it. Among the contributing factors:

Here is a hint: income inequality isn’t a problem. Admit that we are not all equal and work from that. We are never ever, all going to cross the finish line at the same time because human nature makes that impossible. Some people think that shit like this is what should determine income, while others, the ones with the income, actually feel work – and yes, work that doesn’t involve manual labor is work and not ignoble as you Marxists fuckwads want to pretend it is – makes the difference. The later are right. The former are envious and greedy. How much wealth is enough? None of you fucking business. Espeically when it is crooks in government trying in an obscene way to dictate that. Class warfare sucks ass.